Insurance rate software applications exist for allowing users to research current or future insurance rates or premiums based upon current or past insurance rate information. These applications generally prompt a user or database for an input of data, and display analysis results. However, the results provided by these applications often only provide limited strategic information (i.e., information upon which decisions can be made regarding a user's insurance rates and premiums). As a result, data manipulation, extrapolation, and estimation are typically necessary. For example, a user may wish to determine what effect, if any, will result when a change is made in one or more factors used to determine the user's insurance premiums offered to the user's customers.
Without knowing how such a change will affect the user's offered premiums, it can be difficult to determine the user's position in the marketplace (e.g., whether the resulting premiums would be too expensive compared to other insurance providers or too far below market value). To determine the impact of the change, the user can apply the change to existing policies in the user's portfolio, or can prepare one or more sample policies based upon sample risks. However, the application of the change to existing policies can take a great amount of time and effort, and may not reflect the true impact such a change can have on future business of the user. In addition, the process of developing sample policies and sample risks can be both complicated and time consuming.
In either case, the results of such a change to a user's insurance policies will need to be compared to similar policies offered by other insurance providers. Depending upon the number of other insurance providers selected for this comparison, the amount of work needed to generate useful comparison data can be tremendous. In addition, it is often difficult to manipulate data for purposes of comparison because every insurance provider uses different bases and different insurance rating factors to determine their premiums.